Social listening

MARK 490 Week 4

• What is social listening?• Passive and active listening• Tools• Techniques – including software and

constructing meaningful keyword searches

Don’t be caught by surprise...

• The story of the 9 year old and her food blog (first 1.5 minutes of Clay Shirky at TED 2012)

• “This brings up the question what made them think they could get away with something like that?” (Clay Shirky)

• They obviously hadn’t realized that they had to listen.....

What is “social listening”

• “..using technology to assemble a collection of keyword-based searches online that help you locate mentions and instances of those keywords on the web”

• It is a market research tool…• It is competitive intelligence• It is a path to engagement

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

What are you listening for?• What people are saying about your brand:– Your organization’s name – Your social media username(s)– Your brand / product / service / organization– Specific campaign names or concepts– People or stakeholders in your organization– Nicknames, slang, abbreviations, acronyms, or

misspellings of any of the above

• Competitor analysis– All of the above for your competitors

• General industry discussion

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Passive versus active listening

• Passive listening is a diagnostic and monitoring exercise, an ear-to-the-ground– Are people talking?–What are they saying?–Where are they saying it?

• Active listening includes that constant monitoring but also includes response and engagement (we will look at that in more detail in our next class)

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

How does social listening impact a business?

• Sales• Promotion• Marketing & PR• Customer service• Research and development

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Sales• Social media is not usually used as a

direct sales channel (it just doesn’t work) • Listen for expressed need (people often

ask for recommendations on social media, so offer information and assistance).

• Approach people carefully at the point they are ready for help

• Intelligence for sales people–Microsoft Social Listening Spring '14 Sales Sc

enarios (short video)The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Promotion

• Track mentions of your product• Assess sentiment around your brand• Quantify and evaluate the success of

current promotions• Test ideas

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Marketing & PR

• Listening helps you learn the language of your customers– Match your marketing communications to the

way people talk about your product or service– Helps you to de-jargon-ify your marketing copy

• Example: American Red Cross noticed that people used the word “hope” a lot when talking about them– They wove that word into their own

communications so they would resonate better with audiences

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Customer service

• If you are listening you can respond fast and via the medium where your customers are

• Concerns, questions, grievances• Identify recurring customer service

concerns then use them to build a FAQ on your website

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Research & Development

• Innovation can come from your target market• Try searching your company or competitor’s

name plus the terms “wish they had” or “really needs”

• Identify unmet needs• Identify problem areas with products• The big advantage of social listening is that

these conversations are unfiltered and unmediated (very different from traditional survey research)

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

LISTENING MODELS

Resources: how much time does this take?

• You need to decide how much listening is worthwhile and whether you have the resources available to monitor and analyze the results

• Baer & Naslund identify 3 levels of listening that organizations can do

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Level 1 Listening• Dipping a toe into social media – information

gathering and analysis only• Typically one person using free or inexpensive

software tools (often someone in a communications role)

• Usually passive listening only• Activities:

– Spending 2 – 4 hours per week aggregating information

– Conducting searches focused on brand only– Maintaining information centrally as intelligence only– Spending 1 – 2 hours per week analyzing and

reporting on findingsThe Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Level 2 Listening• Social media becomes more important to the

organization but listening still centralized• Intent shifts to include both passive and active listening• Activities:

– Monitoring by one or two individuals centralized in one department

– Engaged in active listening and aggregation 10 – 20 hours per week

– Using more advanced free dashboards or paid tools– Searches expanded beyond brand to include

industry/opportunity– Routing relevant posts to key contacts in other departments

for action / response– Spending 5 – 10 hours per week analyzing and reporting on

information

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Level 3 Listening• Listening becomes a function of many parts of the

business – fully wired active listening• Activities:

– Monitoring by 1-3 person teams in key business units. Overseen by social media leadership

– Engaging in listening 40 hours or more per week (including outside business hours)

– Using sophisticated paid tools– Conducting searches in brand, competition, and industry– Routing all posts to dedicated response teams– Spending 20 hours or more per week analyzing

information; housed in individual business areas– Social listening data integrated into CRM, marketing

automation systems, web analytics, and product management

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Listening models

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

How to get started• Embrace the fact that listening is like answering phone calls –

just the medium is new• Determine first whether you are in passive or active listening

mode• Figure out what your goal is for listening. What do you hope to

gain?• Brainstorm brand-related keywords and terms you will use in

searches• Decide on your focus: just brand or expand into competitive

intelligence• Delegate the people who will do the front-line listening

(number will depend on level of listening). Determine deliverables and time resources.

• Choose appropriate tools and software• Route a flow of information inside the organization to the

people who can use or act on itThe Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING DASHBOARD

Software tools for listening• As needed alerts – the simplest way

• Free social media monitoring software

• Paid social media monitoring software

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

As-needed alerts• For use when brand / name / product mentions are

relatively rare• Set up Google Alerts to create a “push” notification

whenever your keywords are mentioned (automatically emailed to you)

• Free service• As many alerts as you like • You need to be careful about crafting your alert (either

too little or too few results) – so be really specific• Not real-time – delay between mention and alert can

be as long as 24 hours• Alerts arrive individually, so harder to analyze

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Free social media monitoring software

• There are quite a few to choose from, and you will probably need to use more than one to get good coverage

• Hootsuite (free and paid versions) http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-hsu-videos-2/

• SocialMention • Twitter search• Addictomatic• BoardTracker (focus on forums)• IceRocket (social specific search engine)

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Paid social media monitoring software• Fully featured dashboards, analytics, reports

(aimed at the enterprise / large organizations)• Can be used by teams / multiple clients• Integrated with other metrics from across all

marketing channels (eg. Web analytics, advertising metrics, etc)

• Examples:– Salesforce Marketing Cloud / Radian 6 (demos –

registration needed)– SLD Social Intelligence Solutions (was Alterian)– Hootsuite Pro– WebTrends

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

KEYWORD SEARCHING

Solving the problem of getting relevant results

• If your brand or company is a common word, or a word that is used with other meanings – you need to disambiguate by using techniques to get social listening results that are not full of “other” uses of the word - Search for mentions of Tide and see what you

get….lots of time-wasting and irrelevant results- Think about phrases that are strongly associated

with your brand – laundry, detergent, washing machines etc

- Or exclude a term if you can

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Boolean searching..AND...OR…NOT• Search operator AND: narrows your search– Tide AND laundry gets results only where

BOTH words occur

• Search operator OR: broadens your search– Tide OR laundry get results where both or

either words occur (results where there are at least one of the words)

• Search operator NOT: excludes words from your results– Tide OR laundry NOT ocean

http://booleanblackbelt.com/2008/12/basic-boolean-search-operators-and-query-modifiers-explained/

Other basic search modifiers

• Quotation marks – results include the exact phrase only“Tide promotional code” – very exact results for

people who are looking for this

• Parentheses – tell the search engine explicitly that you are using OR– (Tide OR laundry OR detergent)

• Asterisk – used for getting variants of a word by using just the stem– Manage* gets results for manage, managers,

managers, management etchttp://booleanblackbelt.com/2008/12/basic-boolean-search-operators-and-query-modifiers-explained/

All search engines implement this a bit differently in terms of

defaults• Some search engines default to OR, some

default to AND, some provide specialist operators and modifiers

• Learn how your chosen social listening tools actually work so you can control your searches– Use Google Advanced Search for Google Alerts– Hootsuite also provides examples of how search

works there• Add Stream > Search > Show examples• Important to also use language codes (short video)